Top 12 Things to Consider if You Need to Boost Visitors in 2015

I hope you girls and guys are already aware of the fact that Math is the Mother of Science. In the world of Math, there exist only 2 things; the first is called a Constant and the other, a Variable. So is the case with Internet Marketing Realm as well!

Search engines continue to update their algorithms to better understand and deliver the SERPs for their users. According to Moz’s Change History, 13 major updates were implemented by Google in the year 2014.

So, whenever they do something in SEO, it remains constant. While the other needs an update or a change. So, in this article, our main focus is to consider the changing SEO scenario and understanding the new industry demands. This is the time when every digital agency’s marketing department is planning to give an innovative splash in 2015.

1 – The pogo sticking concept

What’s Pogo Sticking? Note that Google observes every minor activity of its users. So, whenever a user instantly closes the website just after opening it up, the phenomenon is given a name of Pogo Sticking. Its one of the most powerful rankings signals that Google determines the “Quality” of a web page.

Bounce rate & marketing strategies are reciprocal

Simply put, high bounce rates are always harmful. With your adopted marketing strategies, your bounce rates must be low. And if it’s not the case, then yes, there’s something wrong with your strategies.

Along with providing the most useful content, you should gently and wisely use the images, videos and other stuff to guide the eyes, rather than straining them.

Give them directly what they are looking for. For example, if you’ve got an eCommerce store selling replacement parts for iPhones, then at a product page, e.g. iPhone 5 Color Housing page, you should add the following items:

Live chat with product expert

Customer Reviews

Product Descriptions

Product Images (with Zoom in and out)

Related items

Tools that assist in replacing the kit

Forum help option and much more!

Here’s what you don’t need to do: Don’t use floating ads or popup windows. They irritate the visitors a lot!

SEO Tip:

Share the content to read further:

Implementing above recommendations wouldn’t only help your customers, but will also let search engines love your website and hence, treat them politely!

2 – User friendly navigation

Imagine a situation where you land on a page curiously waiting for something, but can’t guess how to move around the site. The navigation titles are confusing at most. What sort of impression you’ll have?

Note that at every page, every level of your website, at every page level and at every word of your page, you’ve to guide your customer on how to accomplish a certain action. Don’t let your customers click and dig time and again because in such a case, they’ll never come back.

Bringing it back to life

Before finalizing a website navigation structure, it’s better to have some expert within your team and develop a clearly written plan or a sitemap. Here is the time to name the menu items. Here’s the spot where you need to be very much relevant.

As a particular example, I’d like to say that if you’ve to mention your services, then just naming it “Services” wouldn’t be enough for a new customer, who doesn’t know anything about you. So, naming it as “Accounting Services” or “Law Services” would be a good approach.

You may also do another thing, for example, create a menu item in such a way that whenever a user hover over it, a drop down menu should open up with a good looking list of your services.

The Beautiful Mind – A film for Mathematicians, BUT lesson for all

If you watch the film “The Beautiful Mind”, you’ll notice that when a particular scenario comes up based upon hero’s observations, he had to say:

“Every problem has more than 1 solution”

So, keeping that in mind, welcome all departments of your team to contribute their respective ideas while planning for future. As I always say, there’s always someone smarter in the room.

SEO Tip:

Using a well planned navigation with properly written words not only helps customers move around easily, but also lets search engines crawl through your website quickly, as they often come up with limited crawl budget.

Note that internet is infinite, but a spider’s crawl budget isn’t!

3 – Content’s Dis-Intermediation

Have you ever observed an important aspect that whenever you Google for a definition or Q & A, above all 10 blue links, you’re presented with 3-4 lines of excerpts?

So what’s the point for marketers and webmasters? Here’s that point:

No matter what industry you’re in, just try to produce some more than basic and conventional definitions and answers of common industry terms and topics (based on new researches and trends). Here’s another important signal: using long tail search terms.

4 –Good Bye to “Building” Backlinks, Do Welcome “Earning” them

If you ponder over the struggle Google has initiated for last few years, you’ll observe a great change therein: now Google opts for not counting the backlinks that you can build, it’s going to prefer those links that are very hard to get to and often acquired by appropriate editorial reviews.

5 – Let backlink profiles take a Social Breath

When it comes to social media, building strong relationships must ring the bell in your minds! Especially getting a reasonable number of plus ones, pump up your overall marketing performance. It gives Google a signal that your content is going to be popular among communities and Google should treat it uniquely.

Spending a bit more time on social media and following up with your audience’s interactions is a second to none tactic! Note that 72% of internet users amplify the content via social platforms.

6 – Internal Linking, Often Overlooked

If you’d talk to some SEOs, they start bombarding on you with the ideas like oh…you want to rank? Believe me that if you must create high RP, do follow inbound links to your website…blah blah…! But in most of the cases, they do forget the impact of internal linking.

Neither you, nor your customers like to see an error page or a page under maintenance when they click a link. Note that internal links help you increase the traffic towards other pages of the website as well. So, do you want to lose the traffic? A sensible answer will be a big “NO”.

Bringing it back to life

Point out all of your pages that don’t have internal links. How to do this? You may run some automated tools for this. The best and easiest way to do this is using Google Webmaster Tools. I’m not going to write a detailed note on how to proceed, but I think the following snapshot is enough to explain everything:

SEO Tip:

Note that every page should have at least 1 internal link, from such a page that’s already indexed! Now you’ll get benefits in 2 ways:

Search engine spiders can easily crawl on your website and you can feel a trickledown effect when it comes to page rank.

Redirect your error pages to proper replacements so that users wouldn’t have to fiddle with anything

7 – Poorly optimized Home Page = Leave money on the table

Few webmasters think of having a Flashy home page while adding some sort of music and floating windows or popup attract their users’ attention in a better way. If you’re from the same group, then I’d love to say you “Stop” thinking like that.

Think of your home page as if it were your main office door. Now, if you keep your office door safe and clean, you’ll have more chance of getting your visitors IN, and if you’ve a poor door flooded with garbage, then best of luck to have someone to ring the bell.

Bringing it back to life

Believe me that home page is the hub of your business. So, why not you keep it inviting, attractive and easy to understand? If you have some ads or messages like ‘click to continue’, get rid of it ASAP! Think about placing some awards that you’ve achieved or giving out your social media profiles.

If you can present what’s new feed somewhere on the home page, it’s also a good technique to let your visitors know what’s going on in your company. It also gives them a friendly look.

SEO Tips:

If you don’t have a clear Call To Action (CTA) on every important place of your website, then you’re almost in danger!

Think about the part of your website that helps a visitor covering the conversion distance! Pay more attention to all such parts. Use Google Analytics to track all user behavior.

8 – Don’t be mysterious about what you do

If you’re a goldsmith, clearly mention it on all important places of your website and feel proud of it. If you’re a musician, don’t be shy or mysterious in letting visitors know who you are and what you do.

We all have experienced it. We landed on a website, tried to read there about page, but closed the website without knowing what they actually offer. For instance, “We cherish our customers and provide vital services and products to calibrate individual results, making your processes simpler and more efficient.” This is too vague an example and I hope you got it.

Bringing it back to life

I just want to say, proudly and explicitly mention what you do, who you are, where you work and what you can actually offer to your customers. Respect your users’ time and yours too!

SEO Tip:

If you’re upfront with what you actually offer, you can also enjoy using keywords inside your content and it’s simply senseless to be unclear about announcing your services or products!

9 – User friendly Vertical Depth

Just compare the two situations! First, if your office is at the 10th floor and your competitor has office at 2nd floor (and assume both offer almost the same quality and rates, and there’s no lift) then to whom (one of you) visitors would prefer? Answer is simple, “No Visits to yours!

In the same way, try to keep the important pages of website as close to the home page as 3 clicks. In other words, an important page must not be more than 3 clicks away from the home page!

In a Nutshell

There are a lot more things to be mentioned here, but the article is going to be too long. So, I’d love to put them here just as an overview:

Don’t ignore your customers using mobile devices to find you

Optimize for Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! – As Firefox has switched from Google to Yahoo as its default search engine. Same hot rumors are floating about DuckDuckGo

Instead of focusing on exact keywords, discover and hunt for your profit metrics

About The Author

Ghufran is a passionate writer who loves to write about latest industry developments, hottest news, rumors and he writes to change the way online businesses perform on the web. Writing for internet marketing related topics is his specialty. He has written Advanced SEO Guide as well. He's also the CEO and Chief editor for the blog rGhufran and writing for so many other blogs.